skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LA started installing plastic bollards on main boulevards like Venice, Olympic.

I've had a few buddies injured, one severely, because the well-meaning bollards interfered with organic cycling paths and led to collisions.

An organic cycling path is one where either there's no formal cycling path or the painted path is not actually safe for cyclists.

Often engineers who install these devices are not regularly cycling on the routes, or even cycling at all. They are not aware of the natural flow of cyclists and how they interact with vehicles. They see a deterministic cause and effect of road markings to road behavior. True road dynamics among cyclists & motorists are non-deterministic.

Another terrible example was installation of bollards along popular "group" ride routes where hundreds of club cyclists ride before commute times (before dawn). Thankfully we worked with the city to have them removed, but it likely cost $500k+ for the installation & removal.

My point is that often well meaning safeguards end up causing harm, and that policy makers don't actually use the systems they are managing.
> I wonder if a similar thing can happen with non-physical pursuits (specifically, coding) if relentlessly forced to over-do one thing over a long period of time.

I've seen this happen to other people and mildly had it happen to me, so yeah I'm convinced it's a thing. I'm probably back to 80-85% of what I was, but it's been almost 10 years, so age (I'm now 40) has maybe made that my new ceiling.

> ...experience

Even though my raw LOC has declined, I'm a much better engineer than I was 10 years ago. I credit being better able to avoid big bads and pick probable right answers because of experience. I've focused on being a better systems thinker rather than like, nailing algorithms and such, and I think that's been an important part of my recovery: one using other parts of my brain and finding something else to be interested in, and two broadening my thinking.
What does proportion have to do with anything? You can't actually expect a country at war to supply the enemy with ammunition, period. I don't expect Hamas to allow an Arutz Sheva, or even Haaretz, office to operate on their airwaves.

Re: journalistic integrity. It's arguable, but I would say no- and many others in democratic countries would too. Bleach doesn't cure COVID, vaccines don't cause autism, and Israel isn't commiting genocide. When the facts are being twisted and misinformation endangers human life, there is a responsibility to get it right or shut it down. I am not talking about the average person having stupid uninformed opinions and shouting it to the rooftops. I am talking about professionals. Same goes for many other professions. If you're programming firmware for a dialysis machine, and you knowingly introduce a bug to kill people, your power to distribute that code to hospitals should be taken away before people get hurt.
> It's even banned in some Arab countries for being a security risk.

If I recall Egypt partially did that after the military coup, and some Gulf countries. None of which are known for being kind to criticism. So this point is more validating of Aljazeera's position as relatively honest journalism in the a region full of dictatorships and corrupt governments.
> all US journalists who worked for it were no longer allowed to after the outbreak of the war

Again, source?
This is absolutely perfect! For a couple years now I've been looking for (and badly trying myself) to have a good way without paying quite a lot of money to create SVGs out of OpenStreetMap data!
Dillo Plus supports external media playback (https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus/#external-media-p...), maybe it could be backported to Dillo?
> Interesting you're showing 15% - 16%, and the LLM technique showed 15%.*

Yeah. But I don't think it's hinting at any fundamental theoretical limit.

Both the LLM and my examples were trained on data including the full text of Alice in Wonderland, which we're "compressing". Probably many copies of it, for the LLM. In theory they should both be able to reach 0% (or very close).

So both the blog post and my examples are a bit silly— Like "losslessly compressing" an image by diffing it with a lossy JPEG, then claiming a higher compression ratio than PNG/JPXL because the compression program is a 1TB binary that bundles Sloot-style blurry copies of every known image.

In fact, by just adding `--maxdict=1MB` to my first example, `zstd -D` gets down to 13.5%. Probably lower with further tweaking. And adding an explicit `cat text.txt >> FullTextsSample.txt` brings `zstd --patch-from` down to… Uh. 0.02%. 40 bytes total. …And probably around a third of that is headers and checksum… So… Yeah. A bit silly.

I think a better comparison should probably:

- Have a clean separation between training data, and data to be compressed. Usually the compressed data should be similar to, but not included in, the training data.

- Use the same training data for both the LLM and conventional compressor.

- Include the dictionary/model size. And compare methods at the same dictionary/model size.

Also, as an aside, the method in the blog post could probably also get smaller by storing token probability ranks for most of its current explicit letters.
The formulation of a succinct full text index as an "infinite n-gram model" is both genius in connecting with the ML literature, but also blind-eye, in that it ignores all the work on using exactly this data structure (well, the FM-index) over DNA. bwa mem is the OG ∞-gram aligner.
Maybe we need a reporting system for maintainer changes of bigger projects. Some list where they get published and people can keep an eye on it.

Those changes of maintainers need to be synced to package distribution sites like npm.js or Debian packages and put in context with versions/releases.

In Europe this was introduced for banks after the banking crisis. If a bank does any organizational change, a report is sent out to all member states of the EU right away and any of the 27 national bank agencies can check if they notice something unusual. It might be possible to bribe a few people in your own country, but it’s really hard to bribe all responsible people in 26 other countries.
Jesus Christ. What a dark story.
I haven’t checked but how do they handle streets if the signs have two different spellings? There was a street growing up that was spelled two different ways and I still don’t know what the right one was!
I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it clearly though. Does anyone else feel the same and maybe knows what causes it?
Dijkstra told similar stories. Working in the immediate post-war Netherlands he got something like 30 minutes of machine time a week. I may be wrong on the exact amount of time, but it was extremely limited.

I believe that, at least until recently, quite a lot of the continental European approach to computing science was due to the culture those early pressures created.
There's also https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake which is mostly a wrapper around FetchContent with good caching. I used vcpkg for https://github.com/zig-for/snfm - it made builds easy, but I'm on the fence if I'd use it for anything that is single platform. The thing that made it powerful was really good support for cross platform builds, but I could probably do the same thing with FetchContent and a few toolchain files.
Did a car in fact pivot around it?
From what I saw in their video, there’s a top bar that on mouse-over expands and becomes a virtual desktop switcher with an arbitrary number of virtual desktops. Otherwise it appears to be a somewhat standard floating window setup. I didn’t see a menu, but my guess is that there is one or there’s some sort of rofi/dmenu work-alike or that it makes use of one of those.
I don't think that HN is middle of the road politically, I think it is mostly apolitical; the average has no significance. Some people on HN are of all political opinions, this is great, but voting seems sometimes skewed in some direction - it does not even indicate where the average is. Being very little political is one of the things I like most about HN.
Yes. Right now there are probably a dozen planet scale disasters brewing. We’ll just have to manage them, like we did before. That’s sort of the price with technology, you solve your problems and get new problems, but along the way life gets better. And you can’t stop that push for a better life, i.e. people want the technology too much. So we’ll have to grow with the challenges, we’re on a rollercoaster and we’ll have to lay the tracks.
This results in amusing side-effects, like buying a house requiring you to sign every variation of your name that the credit check found, but it can also get you multiple “one per person” signup options, so there’s that, too.
Some options at the $10 price point on AliExpress, though I cannot recommend one, maybe another reader can. CTs are the generally accepted way to do this and don't have to modify mains wiring. Could also build your own; CTs are inexpensive.
Did you look at chinese STM clones? We used gd32, I liked it.
Facetious but half serious reaction: surely grafana usage nullifies any possible benefit from the monitoring? If there is one piece of software regularly using way more resources than seem reasonable it's that one.
That JS hack looks perfect. Except it shows up just how bad a font I've had to deal with is - Bebas Neue where the dimensions are just completely out of wack on it's little chart.
Have two separate files just for keeping track of the types is such a burden in Ruby.
Not sure why it's relevant whether you heard about the startup I mentioned. The point I wanted to make is that being cheapest is a valid path to success, and that there's evidence of this. It's also more realistic to aim to be a $1M ARR business than Oracle.

I'm aware of all the MBA theory around pricing. But it doesn't matter that much when you're starting off. You need to find the right entrypoint in the market, and pricing can be one valid reason why people will end up buying your product.
They definitely do, I'm planning to release a new package to do that in a couple weeks
re: C/C++ development: anybody using conda/pixi for dependency management? Here's an example of compiling a C++ SDL program using pixi and the SDL dependency from conda-forge [1].

Seems viable as a replacement for things like vckpg [2] which only builds from source.

I'm still researching this but it seems like rattler [3] is the tool to use to build/publish packages. The supported repos are: prefix.dev's own hosting, anaconda.org, artifactory or a self-hosted server.

--

1: https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi/blob/main/examples/cpp-sd...

2: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg

3: https://prefix-dev.github.io/rattler-build/latest/authentica...
The difference is that Times of Israel is privately owned, while Al Jazeera is operated by an authoritarian government. also the information I posted can be found in other places. However, if you think a government that promotes modern slavery is probably a good source for journalism, that's your choice to make.
kvql: SQL-like query language for key-value databases
> Now I wonder: Why is it here?

The internet gods bestowed two* of these on us today. The other one is
Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267639. I posted an answer there to someone who asked more or less the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. The principles are the same, so if you're willing to read it mutatis mutandis and maybe take a look at some of the other posts I linked to, you should find what you're looking for.

(* no, it's not a trend—just random fluctuation)
That's still the title of the actual post. I like it though.
> If you can't be bothered to pull over while driving by yourself in the nuclear apocalypse

Are trying to be silly? I'm much more concerned about drivers having access during a bizzard, earthquake, mudslide, forest fire or any of the other regularly encountered hazards about which AM radio is used to communicate with drivers.

> If you can get into someone else's functioning vehicle you can also get to the one mandated to be in the trunk instead,

An item physically attached to the vehicle is much more likely to be there.

If you think mandating emergency radios is good, then go for it. Let's wait to see how well that plan works before removing a standard piece of safety equipment that has worked well for decades.
I nerded out on this a few years ago and ended up buying a not well known device called a rainforest automation eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/). Its a pretty straight forward little linux device that reads your smart meter (after being enrolled via your utility). It exposes an xml api that I bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

I also bridge my utility (ComEd's) pricing feed to prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). Between those 2 I get pretty good whole home utilization and pricing info graphed into Prometheus (and thus into Grafana).
Provide any evidence of the accusations you’re hurling, please.
Little more precize about Soviet cipher braking. It was a group of mathematicians, not just smart soldiers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Po...
I think I get the sort of tongue-in-cheek vibe of the title, but IMO this sort of joke works better if you target yourself rather than the reader/potential user. So, IMO, “asks better questions than me” instead of “asks better questions than you.”

I wonder if the real goal is to ask better questions than the least engaged members of the meeting, but hey, we don’t want to insult the people that actually deserve it, more likely to hurt feelings.
> In the case of Israel, the Middle-Eastern unit were literally showing videos demanding further uprising against Israel across the region directly from Hamas.
>
> It's even banned in some Arab countries for being a security risk.
>
> Why would you allow that to continue in your country?

Especially when you have, in your country, about 20% of muslim arabs, most of which being israelo-palestinians (i.e. palestinians with an israeli passport).

The last thing they'd want, in addition to fighting both Hamas and Hezbollah, would be an uprising of the israelo-palestinians who live in Israel.

It's of note that while there about 20% muslims in Israel, there's about zero jewish person in Gaza (there are some israelo-palestinian though) and zero jewish person in Iran. Or close to that.

The number of publication and jewish newspaper offices in both Gaza and Iran should also be food for thought.
Israel has never formally left behind the "make it up as you go" spirit of the founding days. Not entirely surprising considering that they've never had a lack of more pressing problems. But a "who needs rules if we are all friends" attitude certainly seems a bit anachronistic by now, and really not a good fit for the reality on the ground.

But I make it the centerpiece of my best-case scenario for the region: imagine that gap left by the absent constitution getting filled by something aggressively secular, with a strong set of entrenched clauses (aka eternity clauses) protecting individual religious freedom from any majority shifts that might happen. Perhaps even with some strong federal element enabling peaceful growth (and Brexit-like shrinkage) like the EU. I'm certainly not holding my breath, neither expecting Israel to come up with anything like that (despite their internal made-up-as-they-went not being terribly far off, I think) nor this having any effect on countries refusing recognition. But then what other best-case scenarios are there?
Most games can be either recompilable or able to being run with xnaify or similar Mono/C# wrappers.
Maybe not so impossible. Start with making a list of projects that are everywhere. Inside every Linux distribution, inside every react/angular/vue/etc project, …

Then check which companies support those projects with active development, and calculate a rating. Are the companies located inside democracies or are they mostly from china or Russia?

It’s probably not that many packages in the end. A few thousand high impact/risk projects probably.
I think DEI as implemented is worse than this. It’s a calculated, prepared defense against the possibility of future bigoted behavior.

Corporate America (which increasingly includes universities whose primary business is endowment investment) don’t just want to wash away our past, they want to ensure they can keep operating business as usual.

DEI is insurance. Yeah the bad thing may happen but we paid for it before hand so we are insulated against further repercussions.
You can run Python in every web browser using PyScript (https://pyscript.net) or Brython (https://brython.info).
> Maybe we need a reporting system for maintainer changes of bigger projects. Some list where they get published and people can keep an eye on it.

The rust project does it. There's a repo with all [active] members and their permissions on github, etc. These get synchronized and updated every time there's a change.
> Maybe it would feel poetic if he was also a car-user, having his life destroyed by a car, but he didn’t even have a car.

Jesus Christ, does this author ever have a bone to pick. Implying that anyone who ever operates a car deserves (at least a little bit) to die a horrific death.
No long trail walking usually or drifting. Thank you for the wool suggestion I've heard they dry a lot faster as well. I used to walk 4-7 miles to and from school. Now I drift which may be up to 10 miles per day could that be the only issue here?
This is only going to get worse with Large Language Models. Let's imagine a somewhat knowledgeable individual, could craft both emails, messages and even commits with a bunch of prompts. Those will relate deeply to the project.
It’s exceptionally regional once it is full systems as they’re heavy as hell. Find a local scrapper and get in touch and you can often save tons by avoiding shipping.
> America is a special case and does not represent the regular folks of the world

Israel's net favourability is down globally [1]. But there is zero evidence it's losing legitimacy; very few countries flipped sign. Instead, it was countries that didn't like Israel a bit disliking them more. (And again, not to the degree of carrying policy consequences.)

> issue of the United States’ support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old

Sure. 31% is a lot. But it's also still 31%.

[1] https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opini...
When recruiting students into science/technology-centric paths (which is what MIT is looking for), it's important to accept that the required mix of interest in the subject and a strong work ethic is just not all that common. It's also difficult to predict which students are going to have those characteristics based solely on high school grades, SAT scores, etc.

Thus excluding anyone from the pool of applicants on the basis of things like gender, ethnicity, etc. means you end up with fewer students going into challenging math and science programs, which is really not a good outcome in terms of remaining competitive with China and other booming technological sectors. For example, Caltech used to be all-male until c.1970 and is now about 45% female at the undergraduate level - but the curriculum is still as rigorous as ever.

P.S. STEAM is better than STEM; the arts these days have many tie-ins with technology and STEM students with no experience of any of the arts are missing out on many economic and personal growth opportunities.
I'm not a lawyer either, but Wikipedia says that requires "a meeting of minds".

It seems pretty clear that Sony always intended to require a PSN account (although that wasn't always communicated well, it was stated on the Steam store page, at the end of news articles, and in the game itself) so there was no meeting of minds. Just confusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_Arabic#Controversie...
I am very interested in increasing diversity but I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.

Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.
DEI exists in countries with no racist past. Does it make it aby better? Also DEI exists in places that were historically very diverse, like the Balkans (a mix of ethnic, culture and religions) and it did not help, actually, because it is highlighting the differences that we worked for hundreds of years to integrate. Fortunately there was no significant impact around here as people were wise enough.
Makes me wonder if some cultures didn't use falls to carve/drill stones with water
>but this way, you're less likely to run into an issue where it takes you to Kings Landing in the wrong town because you didn't type King's Landing in the town you meant.

That's pretty uncompelling. Should we also get rid of the letter s to avoid mix-ups between Kings Landing and King Landing?
I learned from social media that having bigger numbers is better; it means that you are a better person.
That seems very reductive to just say that as if it is a fact. 90% of the claims I've seen about the IDF end up being just nonsense. I did pay very close attention to what happened with Shireen Abu-Akleh and I think that was definitely not dealt with in a satisfactory way.
Keep in mind your neighbors might not appreciate your insect-ful garden if it rubs off on theirs.
OWASP PTK v8.9 with cheat sheets for XSS and SQL just released
All your favorite attack payloads in one place - from XSS WAF bypass to SQL injections for MySQL/MSSQL/Oracle/PostgreSQL.
Sometimes appsec is just one click in your browser.
GlobalUsefulNativeTrees, a database documenting 14,014 tree species
If the tool exists and has minimal overhead, I don't think it is a matter of permission but a matter of necessity. CBMC adds about 30% overhead over just unit testing, in my experience. It does require a different idiomatic programming style to use correctly, and there is a learning curve. Some intuition is required to learn how to use the tool effectively and efficiently, but this can be taught.

For system programming or firmware, it's incredibly useful. I've used this tool in conjunction with threat modeling and attack surface minimization to significantly improve the safety and security of software written in C. At this point, I would not consider working on any C project that did not make use of this tool.
I hear a lot about reliability issues with various wifi smart devices.

I've had perfectly lovely reliability with wifi smart devices in my mixture of zigbee/wifi at home, such that I don't really have a preference. Except for one cheap ESP8266-based wifi relay module that had some liquid damage (not the module's fault), and the LED driver in my very first RGBW light bulb finding death after being used for a few years (a common-enough tale regardless of connectivity choice), they seem to Just Work.

It's all semi-random brands of devices, bought over time.

I'm not doing anything particularly fancy with the network itself: It's just a couple of hardwired dual-band Mikrotik access points, with one upstairs at the back of the house and one downstairs at the front of the house (perhaps non-obviously, on non-overlapping channels). A Pi 4 with OpenWRT quietly does the packet-slinging.

Like in many other places, the 2.4GHz band is approximately ruined where I live these days. It's noisy and slow. But it all works well enough to reliably toggle a relay on or off, at least.

Am I just lucky? Are others just unlucky? Or is there an actual pattern here?